On Joseph Epstein

Please read D. G. Myers’s warm tribute to his teacher Joseph Epstein, one of our finest essayists. In my judgment Epstein’s very best work came when he was editor of The American Scholar and in each of the journal’s four quarterly issues wrote long, digressive, elegant essays under the nom de plume Aristides. He has done much fine work since he was dismissed from the journal in 1998, but rarely has he been given the room to stretch out that he had then, the opportunity to allow thoughts to unspool in a sufficiently leisurely fashion to make the most of his ability to find unexpected connections and write about them in lovely prose.

I also think the journal itself was much better under Epstein than it has been since, and not because I share many (though not all) of Epstein’s culturally conservative views. In an interview a few years back he explained what he was trying to do as editor of The American Scholar:

the point of the small magazines, which is to operate outside “the news cycle,” though not all of them are aware of it. The problem with the news cycle is that it turns so quickly: Hence all the talk of the death of newspapers, owing to their not being able to keep up with the news quickly enough. One cannot live — or at least not live very well — on news, or even contemporary culture, alone. When I edited The American Scholar, I don’t believe the name of any American president then in office appeared in its pages. I thought the point of a quarterly magazine is to get one outside the oppressiveness of the news, with its crisis of the moment, its heated partisanships, and to remind people of the poetry of life, its charm, its grand traditions of learning and creation.

How many non-academic journals exist today, journals in the tradition that used to be called belles lettres, that take this long view of culture and value? Not many; not nearly enough.

If you haven’t read Epstein, I’d suggest that you try some of the collections of his Aristides essays: Once More Around the Block, The Middle of My Tether, A Line Out for A Walk — the latter title one that I’ve never really liked because I can’t help hearing it as being about baseball: If you were a hitter, would you trade a lineout for a walk? But I digress. Epstein’s essays are wonderful, and you should read them.

I might add this note: I wrote a few things for The American Scholar when Epstein edited it, and we corresponded a bit. He was very kind to me, and supportive. I managed to get him to come out to Wheaton once to give a talk, but realized only after he left that I had forgotten to give him his check. He was probably on his way back to his home in Evanston when I called and left an apologetic voicemail message. He returned the call when I was out, and left a message of his own: “Your oversight strokes me as a clear case of anti-Semitism. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer, Mr. Dershowitz….”

I have the good fortune of knowing Joseph Epstein and once went to lunch with him at some obscure Chicago neighborhood eatery he picked out. As we settled into our chairs, he glanced around and announced blandly, “It’s a nice little unpretentious place. In fact, I’d say we’re the only pretentious people here.” (Cough, sputter of water from my drinking glass…)

“[Epstein] returned the call when I was out, and left a message of his own: ‘Your oversight strokes me as a clear case of anti-Semitism. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer, Mr. Dershowitz….'”

A few days after I film that anecdote and the YouTube resulting goes … popular and infects viewers’ computers, it will be known in story and song as the … Viral Epstein-Bar Video. Had the Two Alans duked it out on their cell phones – whether solo or after forming respective hashtag-teams – in the original, symptoms would have included Mano-a-manonucleusis.

“I … think [The American Scholar] itself was much better under [Joseph] Epstein than it has been since … How many non-academic journals exist today, journals in the tradition that used to be called belles lettres, that take this long view of culture and value? Not many; not nearly enough.”

The American Scholar was indeed in an at least Silver Age under Joseph Epstein from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, splitting the difference between the Commentary and New York Review of Books diasporas with a range of mid-Atlantic senior-humanist critics, classicists, historians and philosophers only matched by the pre-1980 Encounter under Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Melvin Lasky.

Now, with, e.g., garish snaps of the Clintons on the AmSchol‘s cover and Kitty Kelley within, one clings to such among its latter-day remnant of standard-bearing columnist/bloggers as Michael Dirda and William Deresiewicz as Buster Keaton does to a flagpole in a hurricane.

But that is only to say that in our present age, such journals do not matter in the way they did, except perhaps in parts. With regard to the tyranny of presentism, Alfred Kazin noted c. 1989 of The New Republic, that once you fought your way past the front of the book, chockablock with the latest cleverest-kids-inside-the-Beltway crop of reflexively contrarian proto-Slatester Harvard-grad neoliberal careerists, you’d find much to admire in the longform essay-reviews, with their impassioned sympathy with creative artists, lined up in the back of the book under veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier – Cynthia Ozick, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Leszek Kolakowski, Tsvetan Todorov, Joseph Frank, Richard Taruskin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bernard Knox, Michael Scammell, Joseph Brodsky, Enrique Krauze, Octavio Paz, Robert Hughes, &c., many of whom, especially during the “culture wars” with both the multicultural left and the neocon right from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, cut real wood.

The New York Review of Books suffers as it always has not just from the proverbial presentism of its political hobbyhorses but from a range of contributors that, however good in spots, is utterly predictable from issue to issue.

The New Yorker, with its million-plus circulation, cannot avoid choking itself on presentist tyrannies of one sort or another, blinking its readers past the tipping point in chasing one nine-day wonder after another in the apparent belief that all’s well that’s Gladwell. The occasional light relief of Louis Menand in the books pages relieves the gloom of seeing the same tight circle of names week in and out.

I leave The Atlantic, Commentary, Harper’s and The Nation to others, who are entitled to them, though each among them does find space for the occasional book review not devoted, in the case of last among those, to obscure Nicaraguan novelists on the side of the angels in politics.

I guess that leaves just the TLS among weeklies and Salmagundi among humanist quarterlies, both affording post-Gerber diets more balanced than those scooped in the literary lunch lines elsewhere.

“A Line Out for A Walk — the latter title one that I’ve never really liked because I can’t help hearing it as being about baseball: If you were a hitter, would you trade a lineout for a walk?”

That reminds me of my original title, “An Intentional Walk on the Wilde Side”, for my 1986 essay on mid-Atlantic literary journals for National Review, so named for my having drawn inspiration to originally cast it as a dialogue after Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist”, first published in hardcover in Wilde’s Intentions from 1891 – I took the liberty of changing the debating aesthetes “Gilbert” and “Ernest” to “Peabody” and “Sherman”. I was overruled on the dialogue format by WFB, Jr., and on the title, changed to “The Fourteenth Colony”, by the magazine’s “Books, Arts & Manners” editor, Chilton Williamson, Jr., without authorial complaint.

Carnac (pressing envelope to forehead): Small Fabulous Jews.
Ed: YES! GREAT WITH COCKTAIL SAUCE!
Carnac (mimes imbibing): Ed hitting plenty of sauce lately in *form* of cocktails … Small … Fabulous … Jews (slices open envelope with stray Budweiser cap): Who do cheap Broadway producers hire when putting on The Wizard of Oz for the matinee and Fiddler on the Roof in the evening?
Ed: HOHOHO!!! TALK ABOUT YOUR COMING OUT CAST PARTIES!!! … And now, Budweiser salutes our nation’s brave men and women in Cossack uniform and Munchkin costume – but first, Shep here, who we’ve kept hungry for six days, is going to show us how dogs just go crazy for the great aged-in-oak-barrels taste of Alpo …

From dipping into his essay collections back in the Eighties or so, I knew my wife and I liked Joseph Epstein.

Two years ago, the local university library was due to be renovated. Contrary to what you would expect, this meant a loss of storage space. “Progress” marches on. An immense discarding of books and periodicals prepared for the “improvements.”

Among the treasures that I rescued from recycling — a set of the TLS from Jan. 1, 1970, to late 1999 or so… and the Epstein years of The American Scholar.

“Among the treasures that I rescued from recycling — a set of the TLS from Jan. 1, 1970, to late 1999 or so… and the Epstein years of The American Scholar.”

Great minds rescue alike – and so do we:

In April 2010, I discovered, on the “free stuff” page at Craigslist for Worcester, Massachusetts, a stack of about five years worth (c. 2005-2009) of the TLS up for grabs courtesy of a classicist and translator in the town of Douglas, just over two hours southwest of me and about an hour west of my best friend. I was to take the papers from his porch on a Friday morning on my way back from an overnight visit on Thursday to my friend’s, but as I was leaving home on Thursday I decided to chance driving through Douglas first in hopes of arranging, after a quick early-morning email update, to haul my literary booty off a day early. On my way, I stopped off to snap pictures of a sign at a shopping plaza bearing the longest place-name in These United States (Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg). He had already left when I arrived and my email had arrived too late to prompt his moving the papers outside. Noticing a tenant of his walking around out back, I asked after him and explained my mission in hopes of recognition thus and potential access, to no avail. Just as I was about to leave, he surprised me by pulling into his driveway for lunch, and so for dispatch of his giveaway archive. The wheels of chance …

This is unpardonably tardy in Internet time, nonetheless … In a recent essay, Epstein, commenting on student evaluations wrote,

“… the only one that stays in my mind read: “I did well in this course; I would have been ashamed not to have done.” How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and again!”

Indeed. This passing observation neatly captured the sensibility I admire in Epstein.

I enjoyed Joseph Epstein’s writing for years. Then I didn’t. One can’t be a curmudgeon at 10 or 20 or even 30 years old. One has to try things out, experience life, fail and learn.

At 40 or 50 0r 60 one can be as Menckenesque and satirical and jaundiced as one likes. One’s earned the right through experience. But if you’re still plowing the same row at 70 or 80 it starts to get predictable and tiresome.

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T.S. Eliot wrote. I would have liked for Epstein to leave his comfort zone, to attempt new things, to risk something, to turn the critical spotlight back on his own beliefs and prejudices, and not to be so insufferably confident in his own perceptions and ideas and righteousness. But maybe that’s just me.

Here’s something to water the mouth: a forthcoming collection of letters between Joseph Epstein and the veteran screenwriter, novelist, classicist and literary reviewer Frederic Raphael (Darling, Two for the Road, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Glittering Prizes, Eyes Wide Shut, &c.). I recommend that those not familiar with the Chicago-born Englishman Raphael look into the 1976 six-part BBC drama The Glittering Prizes, which when WNET-Thirteen reran it in the fall of 1983 while I was an NYU undergrad inspired me, as one who had seen it around four years before while in high school, to ride the bus from my room up on East 88th Street halfway down Manhattan and back to buy a VCR for c. $400 the better to tape it:

“This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least for correspondents in the twenty-first century, is that Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have never met, nor even spoken to each other. But what is most rare about this book is the authors’ abundant talent for entertaining their readers, as much when the topic is grave as when it is droll.

“Raphael and Epstein agree to embark on a year-long correspondence, but other rules are few. As the weeks progress, their friendship grows, and each inspires the other. Almost any topic, large or small, is considered: they write of schooling, parents, wives, children, literary tastes, enmities, delights, and beliefs. They discuss their professional lives as writers, their skills or want of them, respective experiences with editors, producers, and actors, and, in priceless passages scattered throughout the letters, they assess such celebrated figures as Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Sontag/Leibowitz, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Harold Pinter, Isaiah Berlin, George Weidenfeld, and Robert Gottlieb, among many others. Epstein and Raphael capture a year in their letters, but more, they invite us into an intimate world where literature, cinema, and art are keys to self-discovery and friendship.”